Somewhere in 2011 my sister and her husband had been doing an extended house sit in Panama. I had just done Castle Freak at that year’s BitchPork then headed East for VOV, Taboo’s Wheel party and whatever else was popping. I was Catholic, clean from opiates, avoiding alcohol due to a recent Hep-C revelation and still had a Congress Tape Deck in top condition. They were trying to convince me to come visit but I was kind of on the fence about it. The clincher came when I discovered the house they were watching sat on top of Cerro Brujo: the Warlock’s Peak. Clearly I belonged there.
I had heard about a situation in Panama where you could theoretically hang around yacht clubs at either end of the Panama Canal and vessels in need of extra hands would take you on for the trip. Kind of like getting picked up as a hitchhiker so someone could use a carpool lane except this actually paid and you learn about boats. This bit didn’t work out for me. I was also very interested in wildlife, particularly poison dart frogs, and the experiences to be found in old Catholic Churches and the Kuna Yala tribe. All of this did work out.
I forget the exact line of events but it was probably like a plane to a bus to a ferry and then I end up in Bocas del Toro – the name given to the large southern town on Isla Colon that serves as a hub to the surrounding islands and bits of mainland. Tom and Jenny showed up in a motor boat to get me and fill up on supplies in town. The ride back to Cerro Brujo passed through lots of mangrove swamp and bits of coral that made things feel like we were passing through the maze like corridors of an early 3D Computer Game.
The house they were taking care of was made of wood and built with a circular porch around it. The owner had left behind some dogs and a variety of birds. The dogs were relatively happy as long as there was some type of human around. They liked eating fresh coconut and as the things both grew on trees and contained tasty water we were always throwing it to them.
Things took a darker turn in the bird department. First I met a green parrot and was immediately given the job of clipping it’s flight feathers so it couldn’t fly. It seemed relatively painless at least. Next came a parrot that was not so fickle about human companionship as the dogs. This species bonds for life with a human it considers it’s “mate”. This woman had been absent for some time and the parade of house sitters was cold comfort if any. It had plucked out every feather it could reach in nervous anxiety and resembled an emaciated plucked chicken with a large, overly expressive face. This thing was not having a good time.
Last was not an actual bird but a tragic cautionary tale about a former bird. The owner of the house seemed to be somewhat of a tropical bird Lothario(a?) as she had also life bonded with a Montezuma Oropendela. The males of this species are known for weaving ornate hanging basket nests for their females. It’s easy to imagine how this unlucky househusband might have felt somewhat insecure with an entire human woman as his life mate and, like so many others in a similar situation across all sexes and species, attempted to overcompensate.
The house was located near an indigenous settlement where one of the major industries was creating molas and masks using brightly colored embroidery floss. With little understanding of how personal property works the hapless Montezuma was constantly stealing this floss to jazz up his offering to his seemingly disinterested mate. Panama’s indigenous live in brutal poverty and the “sticky talons” were no laughing matter. The woman was warned that if she could not curtail the theft they would have no recourse but to kill the bird. It sounded like the perfect situation for clipping flight feathers but that wasn’t what happened.
The bird was killed.
My visit was roughly split into three basic activities: exploring Isla Colon, searching for different types of poison dart frogs and spending time beach bumming and snorkeling. Because of my Catholic period I needed to be in Bocas Sunday morning for Mass and grabbed a spot in a hostel Saturday night. The town is built up with gangplanks on top of a swamp and for centuries the residents have disposed of refuse by throwing it out their windows and letting it sink beneath the surface. A German ex-pat kept a shop of antique bottles he had found scuba diving though the mud. I bought a square shaped one with strange rainbow residue on the inside.
In Church the next morning all of the saints were dressed in brightly colored holographic garments like they were going to Carnaval.
Cerro Brujo sat on a little bay where dolphins occasionally came by to hand out. On one of the first nights there was little moon and especially high dinoflagellate activity. They are single celled organisms that glow with a slight blue tone when the water around them is agitated. We took the boat out until the water was black and the absence of light pollution made them especially clear. Simply treading water was great to look at but then we decided to try shooting hadoukens at each other. It didn’t really work – the bioluminescence fizzled out inches from one’s arms, long before the imagined fireball could reach it’s mark.
The next day we got a local who does tours to take us out to a small island known for coral and good snorkeling. There were hammocks on the beaches and a brightly colored ecosystem just under the surface of the turquoise water. Flocks of parrot fish chewing on the coral, tiny swimming squids and a type of luminescent jelly that looked like the Saddleback Graphs from Math Textbooks. Our guide was killing two birds with one stone by also doing a bit of harpoon fishing. I spotted a gigantic pufferfish hiding underneath a dome of coral – it’s huge round eyes reminded me of something from Super Mario 64. I wanted to show Tom and Jenny but avoid letting on enough excitement that our guide might decide to come kill it with a harpoon for it’s potential financial value.
He didn’t catch on.
The most exciting part for me was definitely the frog hunting. There is a poison dart species called oophaga pumilio who are about the size of a thumbnail and what you call “obligate egg eaters”. This means the mother frog puts two tadpoles on her back and climbs high into the trees to deposit them into the tiny pools of water that form inside of flowers called bromeliads – each in a pool of it’s own so they don’t eat each other. After that she eats enough to allow her to produce one unfertilized egg a day and undertakes the climb to feed these to her tadpoles on alternating days.
The geographic isolation of many small islands and isolated bits of the mainland has combined with sexual selection to create a kaleidoscope of different color morphs. The first stop was a pizza restaurant called Rana Azul run by a German ex-pat named Joseph. The surrounding ex-pat community assembled for weekly dinners and I spoke to Joseph about how to find the small blue frogs the spot was named for. He suggested that I take a walk around his banana finca or plantation, the actual business that kept his social pizza club above water.
Panama is a true “banana republic”. Anywhere you go there are tables overflowing with black or heavily brown spotted examples of the fruit on the outside edge of edibility. You would be hard pressed to find an aesthetically pleasing yellow banana anywhere in the country – they are all for export. The industry of growing them does attract many small flies and consequently the small colorful frogs. I was directed to the best spot by Joseph’s indigenous foreman. It was my first experience with the native custom of mercilessly throwing rocks into dog’s faces to make them stop barking.
The Darklands or Tierra Oscura morph is characterized by dark blues and purples going into almost black. While most color morphs are restricted to different small islands in the vicinity these are found on the portions of mainland that can only be accessed by boat because no roads have been built through the jungle. I was able to borrow a sea kayak and explore the forest leading to the nearby Indian School. Here the Darklands morph shares territory with what is called “Blue Jeans” – a red body with blue limbs. I ended up falling into deceptively deep mud that coated my entire 6 feet and 5 inches in the dark watery sludge.
The freshwater lagoon is in within eyeshot of the school, causing the children to howl in amusement as I dipped into the water to clean myself.
Next to Isla Colon is a culturally Caribbean island called Bastimientos – supposedly named for an incident when somebody crashed their ship into it centuries ago. We stopped here for a popular jerk chicken spot but I insisted we undertake some frog tourism. On the other side of the island is a beach called Wizard’s Beach or Red Frog Beach. The local children had made a cottage industry of capturing the bright red specimens and showing them to tourists for tips. They were also known for keeping them trapped in display containers until they died of dehydration so I hunted for my own. Journeying into the forest I came across red, orange and even white variants.
On a less visited stretch of beach the remains of some kind of home-made bathysphere sat decaying just within the tree line – a mix of glass windows, splintering lumber and excessive use of spray foam insulation. I could not tell if it would ever be sea worthy again or if it indeed ever had been.
The farthest we went on this quest was an isolated and rarely visited pair of islands called Isla Popa and Loma Partida. The frogs here are shades of blue-green going to turquoise – quite unlike any of the surrounding morphs. We discovered that the juveniles were sometimes an even more exciting shade of metallic gold. The less exciting part of the visit was that the island rarely got white visitors and there were soon hordes of local children both “watching” our boat and leading us to find the frogs.
No matter how many times I tried to explain that we didn’t need them picked up they would violently slam their hands down at any sign of movement and soon several frogs were dead. Amphibians are a totem of mine and it pains me to see them killed or injured but these children live with casually killing the animals around them as a fact of daily life. I felt particularly horrible knowing that they wouldn’t have bothered catching and hurting these frogs if I hadn’t showed up and expressed interest.
One of them handed me another small dead creature that haunts me to this day. It was a reddish-pink almost coral color and looked like a Chinese Dragon in miniature. Barely larger than the tiny frogs it had a long, slender body, four limbs, an obvious tail and a head that was vaguely puffy shaped like a lion’s mane. I can’t say for sure if it was a very young lizard or some kind of larval newt or salamander, although I do think I saw the faint suggestion of scales.
The entire scenario was putting me in a bad place mentally and I didn’t take a picture or hold on to the tiny body. I’ve often wondered if I saw a creature completely unknown to science as the island is remote and scarcely visited. If any of my readers have any ideas or suggestions based on my description please share as I am dying to know.
I did carry one of the dead frogs back to the house-sit and placed it’s body under a small stone near the dock. The next day ants had picked the bones completely clean and I thought of smuggling the articulated skeleton home in a little matchbox so it wouldn’t be a total waste. The next day even the bones were gone.
Out of all the pumilio color morphs I was most excited to see the Isla Colon morph. Living on the most populous island had caused it to be the most rare of the sub-species due to human impact on it’s environment. It was also the most visually appealing, to me at least.
A yellowish green back with even black spots, yellow stomach, and orange limbs leading to grey hands with the same fine spots. We travelled up and down the island and were told over and over that the “little green frogs” were everywhere but they never seemed to manifest. We visited a gruta or volcanic cave dedicated to the Virgin Mary where we were told they were all over the place every time it rained.
It wasn’t raining.
We thought we saw a dirty old T-Shirt hanging from a tree but on closer inspection it turned out to be a mother sloth with a near infant child clinging to the fur of her back. If you’ve never experienced these beatific creatures in the wild yourself it’s difficult to do them justice. They move as if they were living in a totally alternate universe where time is simply not the same thing. The way that forests of kelp sway underwater when there really isn’t any current.
The day came when I would be returning alone to Panama City to finish out my trip and I had just a couple of hours to kill until my first and last shot at a ferry. I had searched for my morph through every corner of the island except for a beach on the opposite end called Boca del Drago. I looked at the bus schedule and saw there would be just enough time to ride out, look around for 15 minutes and then head back. This side of the island looked completely different: the road followed sharp curves as locals and tourists alike drifted by luxuriously on beach cruiser bicycles.
It didn’t make any sense to be looking into the ocean except that it was so conspicuously different from the ocean I had been looking at. Tiny sharks wriggled through the sand in the ubiquitous shallows. There were bits of sparse forest between the curves of beach that were populated by either young iguanas or barely sub-adult brown basilisks – I can’t remember which. I was returning to the bus stop in defeat when I remembered seeing bits of cow pasture that might have hidden pockets of forest.
I grabbed a sturdy stick as the island is known for a particularly venomous snake: the fer-de-lance. When grass is waist high, as this grass was, merely tapping the ground with a stick is by no means safe but it’s safer than not doing it at all. I crawled under some barbed wire and emerged into the type of shady forest that is ideal for growing cacao and coffee. It is also hospitable for a certain tiny species of frog.
Before I saw anything I heard the sound – a kind of low rhythmic clicking croak the males use to announce their interest in sex to the females and aptitude for violence to their fellow males. I forget the name of these trees where the roots raise up from the ground like walled buttresses. Maybe it’s a type of fig or a terrestrial mangrove. I only know that’s where they were: tiny living jewels in green, yellow and orange. First one, then a couple and then as many as I could ever hope to see. The forest was alive with them.
I’d imagine everybody plays this game with themselves at one point or another. You are looking for something, it’s not guaranteed that you will find it, there’s a good chance you simply won’t. You look in the last place at the last minute and maybe the universe is essentially good and your heart is essentially pure.
But there it is
You pulse beats loudly in your ears, the skin on your scalp begins to tighten and tingle, you are transported, soaring high above you look down on your tiny human body with kindness, you’re not yourself in this moment, you’re everything and of course it worked out because honestly who the hell would live in a universe where it wouldn’t? I mean if that’s the way it works why would you even live there at all?
It’s catharsis
I had a bus to catch. There was a pay phone by the bus and I had some coins. I called somebody to tell them I found my frogs, maybe it was Tom and Jenny. I rode the bus all the way back down the island to the ferry and I climbed on board and took my seat for Panama City.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 